(surreal is a new monthly event series. the next one is in may at stanford about consumer social and Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky, will be there: surrealbuilders.com)

but the most interesting thing from the night for me was hearing from Adam about the original vision for Siri decades ago and how it was roughly the same as what everyone is talking about today: MCP servers, orchestrating agents, and doing tasks for you

hold up, you gotta show us that blue dogfood claude app 🔍😁

I know right

Yup there’s a separate feed for gear! paulstamatiou.com/gear.xml

The magic of browsing the web isn't quite gone, but it's waiting to be reinvented.

There's a lot of detail I'm leaving out of this thread, read the full article here: paulstamatiou.com/browse-no-more

We need intentional personalization. We need refined product functionality, greater transparency about how these systems make decisions or apply personalization, and intuitive controls to let users guide their experience without becoming overwhelmed.

There's a better way. A way that can also help these companies grow their moat. Switching costs for users are as low as can be: just head to the App Store and pick up the next AI tool topping the charts. We saw it with DeepSeek one week and Grok another.

And then there's the whole issue of summary homogenization. We're taking these already not too diverse web sources and flattening them into some muted report. Is this how we want to interface with the web? You end up systematically smoothing out any novel perspectives.

The lack of transparency into how these tools rank and use sources leads to multiple issues. They simultaneously lose trust and give off the feeling of too much... that it's infallible.

Here's a perfect example: The internet is talking about Gruber's Apple post but this opts for mainstream sources

We're dealing with a few issues here:
- Deprioritized attribution
- The black box of AI search
- Summary homogenization and mode collapse

Take sources for example - their representation lacks critical context about how sources are selected, how they're used, and more.

Traditional search engines are turning into answer engines too. Between Google SGE and AI mode, the SERP is turning into a zero click search breeding ground. Nearly 60% of Google searches end without the user clicking to any site.

What I gain in efficiency—no longer needing to browse through slow ad-heavy websites just to find out how long to tie a Windsor knot or grab a recipe—I lose in the personality, idiosyncrasy, and creativity that makes the web feel authentic

Read it here: paulstamatiou.com/browse-no-more